Rahul Dravid saying, “Indiranagar ka gunda hoon main,” still feels slightly illegal. You know it’s coming, you’ve probably watched it more than once, but the way he snaps after someone scratches his car is funny every single time because it’s Rahul Dravid. The joke isn’t the line. It’s the years of believing this man simply did not have that expression in him.
That’s usually how the best ads travel. Nobody says, “Have you seen the new CRED campaign?” They say, “Watch the Rahul Dravid one.” Or “Have you seen Shah Rukh getting rejected?” Or “The Sachin lookalike ad is brilliant.” Or even, “The one where a man is licking a shoe.” The recommendation almost never begins with the brand because the entertainment arrives first. The branding catches up later.
Few creative studios have managed to pull off that trick consistently over the past few years. Moonshot is one of them.
For Devaiah Bopanna, Co-founder of Moonshot, that has never been about chasing virality. It has been about making sure the audience has had a reason to stay before asking them to remember the product.
“We never planned anything. We never planned to start an advertising agency. We never planned to be in this business. It just happened,” he said. “We know we have one skill set, which is writing, and wherever that skill set has taken us, we’ve just gone with it.”
That accidental philosophy has ended up producing one of the most recognisable creative voices in Indian advertising. Ironically, Bopanna has believed that it has worked precisely because Moonshot has never behaved like an advertising agency.
When not knowing advertising becomes an advantage
Most agencies proudly talk about decades of advertising experience. Moonshot has almost worn the opposite as a badge of honour.
“The core team, none of them are in advertising. They’ve never seen the inside of an advertising agency,” Bopanna said. “I think that’s the secret sauce, we just look at solving the communication problem without having any trappings of being an industry insider.”
His own relationship with advertising has been equally unusual.
“My stint in advertising was 2008 to 2015, completely different times, I’ve never seen the inside of an agency in the last 16 years. In a way, I’ve been out of it long enough to be an outsider there.”
That outsider lens has perhaps explained why Moonshot’s work has often resembled internet content first and advertising later. The writing has chased attention before it has chased applause.
Bopanna argued that the industry around him has changed just as dramatically.
“Back then, you had every campaign, a TVC, a print ad, a radio ad, some hoardings. 90% of all spends went into those things.” Now, he has felt, there isn’t one advertising industry anymore.
“It’s gotten fragmented too much. There are too many skill sets you need to be equipped with these days to solve for advertising problems. So I think now it pays to be a specialist.”
That fragmentation has changed another reality marketers rarely discuss: campaigns have become disposable.
“Back then, you did an ad, it could run for a year, sometimes even two. Now because there’s so much content fatigue in people, you can’t run a campaign for more than three, four months.”
Ironically, many of Moonshot’s ads have escaped that fate. The Rahul Dravid film still resurfaces every IPL season. The Shah Rukh Khan insurance commercial continues finding fresh audiences. But Bopanna insisted that those have been exceptions, not the new rule. The internet has simply moved too quickly.
Which has naturally raised the next question: if attention spans have supposedly collapsed, why have people still watched hour-long podcasts, four-hour films and minute-long commercials without blinking?
His answer has been remarkably uncomplicated. “If something is really good, people will sit and watch. But right now there is so much content, the volume is so high, that not all content can be really good, I think it comes down to the quality of content.”
That belief has quietly shaped Moonshot’s writing rhythm too. Every few seconds, something needs to happen. A joke. A visual. A payoff. Another hook before the previous one has worn off.
The internet has trained audiences to expect it. Moonshot has simply learned to write accordingly.
Why the funniest ads are the hardest to write?
Making people laugh has always looked effortless from the outside. Bopanna suggested it has rarely felt that way. “Those are tricky things, because when you’re always trying to push the envelope, you might push it too far.”
The conversation has briefly drifted toward controversial advertising. Without naming anyone, Bopanna has admitted he enjoyed one widely debated campaign while still finding fault with it.
“I absolutely did enjoy it, but I think it wasn’t even funny. It wasn’t even well-written, if it was funnier, and then it was controversial, it makes more sense. But it wasn’t even good quality.” For him, humour has never been an excuse to shock people. “We’ve been in this business really long. We’ve deeply thought about those things for the last decade. It’s the only thing we’ve thought about actually in the last more than a decade now.”
That same understanding of internet culture has also made celebrities unusually willing collaborators. “Celebrities now completely understand the internet. Who doesn’t like to be cool for a day or night? Everyone wants it.”
Which perhaps explains why Rahul Dravid has happily become Bengaluru’s angriest neighbour. Why Shah Rukh Khan has willingly played the overdramatic superstar. Why Sachin Tendulkar has cheerfully allowed himself to become part of a visual gag. “You go to a celebrity who’s smart and who’s intelligent and self-aware, they’re just taking things in a lighter way and being slightly self-deprecating, which they know people will love and enjoy, and it makes them more enduring to their fans.”
Of course, writing alone has never carried those films.
Bopanna repeatedly credited director Rahul Bharti, who has helmed much of Moonshot’s biggest work, with taking deceptively simple scripts and giving them cinematic texture. He also pointed out that the agency’s success has rarely been built on one-off viral hits. The relationships have lasted much longer than the internet’s memory.
Moonshot has made 10-11 films for MakeMyTrip over the past three years, around 15-16 films for Lenskart across three to four years, alongside multiple long-running collaborations that have continued because, as Bopanna has put it, “success bonds people much better than anything else.”
The agency’s strongest category has almost accidentally become finance. “All thanks to Kunal Shah and CRED, because they gave us our first break and that did really well. And then suddenly every finance, fintech brand wanted to be cool.” But there has been another reason too.
“We are all finance geeks. We are very tuned into what is happening in the financial system, so I think that also helps because we understand exactly what each product does.”
That understanding has allowed Moonshot to simplify categories most agencies have traditionally buried under disclaimers and percentages.
And then there is AI, the topic every advertising conversation eventually reaches. Bopanna remained surprisingly optimistic. “Writing-wise, it’s still not there at the level we want it to be at, but it’s getting there.”
Execution, however, has already changed. “I think it’s going to be great for the industry. It’s making the field more democratic. Not everyone has the means and resources to make things. But if AI is going to bring down that cost by a significant amount, anyone who’s truly talented can start doing things without having to wait and knock on doors.”
It’s a hopeful view from someone who has never particularly believed in gatekeeping.
Maybe that also explained why he has refused to draw elaborate five-year plans for Moonshot.
“I don’t even know if there’s going to be a Moonshot in 2030.”
Coming from almost anyone else, it might have sounded like uncertainty. Coming from Bopanna, it has sounded more like consistency.
After all, if Moonshot has spent years proving anything, it is that the best ideas haven’t always arrived with a roadmap. Sometimes they have simply arrived because a group of writers has kept following the only thing they have ever really trusted, the next good line.
